“I am not a monster,” he said. “I have tried to be a good neighbor. I have paid for my crimes and want to be left alone now to live my life.”
Go live it somewhere else.
“I have received eviction. I have twenty-nine days.”
We’ll be watching you every second, scumbucket!
MAKE our NElGHborhood.
SAFE for the CHlldren!
Colesceau raised his hand. He was utterly dumbfounded when the crowd stopped the chant. All he could hear then was the whir and click of the equipment aimed up at him from the sidewalk ten feet away.
“Ummm... I’ve never hurt a child in my life. Never.”
Yeah, just old women who can’t protect themselves! Get back inside you cockface or I’m going to yank your head off and stuff it down your fuckin’ neck!
He looked at the yeller, a burly long-haired man with a can of beer in his hand.
“Carl, you’re worse than him when you talk like that.”
Trudy Powers’s voice hung in the still air. She stepped forward from the crowd.
“We understand your problems, Mr. Colesceau. But we have rights, too. And we want this neighborhood safe for our children, our seniors. We don’t want trouble, either.”
“Then why do this?”
Ah, fuck you.
Trudy’s face turned in a flash of blond hair, then came back to Colesceau.
“We think you could find a more appropriate neighborhood.”
In the fuckin’ nuthouse you came from!
Trudy lifted one of her arms up without looking back.
“Sean, we’re dialoguing! Listen, Mr. Colesceau. We intend to keep this vigil every day until you find more appropriate lodging. We’re citizens with rights and we intend to exercise them. We’ll keep our demonstrations peaceful. But we’re going to have to watch you until you go. We won’t trespass or harm your property in any way.”
Colesceau stood with his drink in one hand and the mob stilled in front of him and the cameras executing him from ten feet away.
“I live here. I go to work. That’s all I do.”
He watched Trudy’s golden hair catch the light and the breeze. She was wearing denim short shorts that showed off her long girlish legs, white tennies and socks and a brief white blouse with a scalloped neckline. Her tall and feeble-looking husband had stepped up beside her now and Colesceau saw the sunlight condensed in his glasses. He was bearded and thin-necked. Colesceau had seen him driving a huge expensive vehicle that had stickers all over the back window asking you to save just about every animal you could imagine.
“We’re dead serious,” he said.
“Dead? What do you mean?”
“God, Jonathan,” said Trudy.
“It means you’ll see us every day for the rest of your life here. We’ll know exactly where you are, every second of your life.”
“I have no objection to this at all. I am an innocent man. And to show my innocence, I want to give you something. Please, wait here.”
No problem there, dude!
Colesceau went back inside his apartment and picked out one of his mother’s most preposterous painted eggs. It was a lavender ostrich egg with gold bric-a-brac and a little bunched-up skirt of lace around the middle of it.
He took the egg back outside and resumed his place in front of the TV shooters.
“This represents all the goodness I possess on earth. I offer this as a pledge of my perfect behavior for the next twenty-nine days.”
He held out the egg with both hands, elbows tucked and head slightly bowed, as if his posture could increase its value.
“For you, Mrs. Powers. For all of you.”
The cameramen inched closer. They emanated an instinctive fear that Colesceau respected. They were used to being hated.
But not Trudy Powers. Trudy, he clearly understood, was used to being adored and loved and deferred to because of her high value as a sex partner. So she came forward with a kind of gliding step, eyeing Colesceau with an expression of self-confidence and self-respect. You could tell she saw herself as an ambassador from one world to another, from the world of the good to the world of the damned. And her willingness to approach the damned pleased her deeply. She was going to accept a handful of feces from the devil himself, smile and be gracious about it.
My evil stimulates her, thought Colesceau. I am titillation. I fortify what she believes is her soul.
She came around the camera people, stepping over a thick bundle of cable with a jiggle of inner thigh, her eyes locked on Colesceau’s. There was pageantry in them.
Colesceau proffered the egg. She reached out with both hands, and a firm but forgiving expression on her face. She looks like Mary on the outdoor fresco at Voronet, he thought, pious and blank and immovable all at the same time. He trailed her palms with the tips of his fingernails as he laid the gift in her hands.
Then he stepped back and looked past her to the crowd. He bowed very slightly and strode back inside 12 Meadowlark.
Twenty
Freedom. Velocity. Interstate 5. Windows down, air blasting through the van. Bill felt the rage filling him now, moving throughout his body. Like boiling water removed from the burner, it settled and filled the shape of its container. Bill Wayne, he thought: vessel of retribution, bucket of hate. Witness this.
He found Ronnie’s beat-up old four-door in the Main Place parking lot, near the entrance closest to Goldsmith’s Jewelry. So she hadn’t lied. All the more reason to get to know her. The mall shops closed at nine tonight, which gave him almost an hour, just right.
So he drove away and into the cluttered construction zone he’d scouted earlier, just .85 miles from the mall according to the van odometer. The mess had something to do with Cal Trans and the I-5. He found the bumpy turnoff and drove along the beaten chain-link fence, past the scaffolding and the water trucks. The gate was closed but not locked. He drove inside with his headlights off and parked, hidden between two big Cats. He cut the engine and sat there a moment. The moon was just a faint face risen prematurely in the eastern sky. It looked alone and embarrassed. Perfect — just two blocks from a stop for the OCTA bus, which would take him straight into the mall when he was ready.
Bill slipped to the back of the vehicle and opened the toolbox. He wouldn’t need Pandora’s Box because Ronnie’s car was almost certainly too old and cheap to have a comprehensive antitheft alarm wired in. Good. Less to carry, less to depend on. No fuses to slip out of place and end up who-knew-where? That meant he’d only need the knockout cloth in the heavy-duty freezer bags, his shopping bag and his trusty Slim Jim. Traveling light.
He got the gas bag out from his instrument kit. It sat atop his surgical “sharps” — the scalpels, dissecting scissors, retractors, forceps, needles and catheters used for the preliminary veinous removal of blood and arterial introduction of fluid.
Holding his breath, he gave the chloroform cloth a heavy fresh dose from the 50mm bottle he’d stolen from the body and paint shop where he’d briefly worked, Saturdays only, over two years ago. He had been a prep man and gofer, tasked sometimes with the unpleasant job of mixing chloroform and alcohol for use as a solvent. The liquid was heavy and smelled kind of pleasant, he thought. When he’d tried it out on a near helpless drunk one night up on Harbor, he had been surprised how quickly it worked.